Criticizing as a Measurement of the Power Relations within Chinese Working Couples

Abstract

This study inquires into Chinese working couples’ (both the husband and the wife have a paid job) marital power relations manifested in their use of face-threatening utterances in family situations. A quantitative approach is adopted and the data come from 4 commonly-accepted “realistic” Chinese TV dramas committed to contemporary Chinese working couple’s family life. First, we identify the strategies character couples utilize to criticize their spouse and also those they use to respond to spousal criticisms, and categorize them into different types according to their face-threatening intensity. Then the differences between husbands and wives in their use of these different types of strategies (in both making and responding to criticisms) are compared quantitatively. An analysis of these differences indicates that while no significant power differences are found in their ways to criticize their spouse, working wives demonstrate more power than working husbands in responding to the criticisms from their spouse. Overall, Chinese working wives have the same or even more marital power in conjugal relationship. This finding mirrors what has been proved in other research fields, that is, women’s marital power has been generally enhanced since the foundation of New China in 1949. In addition, we also find that working husbands are more inclined to avoid the criticisms from their wife and thus the involvement into marital confrontation, which reflects and verifies traditional Chinese stereotypes and expectations on men that they should be more generous and tolerant than women.